I notice that although the Communist Guardian writes a very long article about the fall of Detroit, they never mention any of the reasons, with the single exception of the phrase “white flight.”
One set of my grandparents lived in Detroit, and did very well there. Nice houses, beautiful city.
What destroyed it?
I think two things, in particular. One was, of course, the Auto Worker’s Union, which at first fought with the big three auto executives but then learned to cooperate with them in producing bigger and clunkier cars for higher and higher wages and benefits, that were increasingly poorly put together. First they were threatened by Volkswagen, and then when that started to go downhill, the Japanese moved in, and gradually developed non-union plants in the USA. Why buy a lousy union-made car when you could get a well-made Japanese car for about half the price? Fewer maintenance bills, better mileage, and better handling.
The second factor was the blacks. FDR started it by moving large numbers of blacks up from the south during the Second World War. They stayed there, and gradually took over the auto and other unions as white workers retired.
Then the Democrats developed a plan. They brought blacks into all the inner cities in the name of racial justice, killed the old Catholic ethnic neighborhoods, and deliberately turned the cities into permanent welfare dumps that could be relied on to vote Democrat. The ethnics—Italian, Irish, Polish, etc.—moved out to the suburbs, and the cities were basically hollowed out and destroyed. Blacks might have moved into the cities in the normal course of events, and it would have been OK, but they were poured in in overwhelming numbers, and deliberately kept on welfare, preferably with single mothers and broken families. LBJ deserves a lot of the credit for that.
As Ozone34 points out, E. Michael Jones has written about that. Several books, in fact. I broke with him over what I considered to be his growing antisemitism; but his books are still very much worth reading, if you take them with a certain amount of caution. No question that the destruction of the old inner city neighborhoods was a deliberate Democrat plot to accumulate power and turn things the way they wanted.
Of course the Guardian can’t admit any of that. So they really can’t account for what happened.
Don't believe the "destruction of Catholic neighborhoods" conspiracy BS put forward by quack pseudointellectuals. As an assimilated white American of Polish and Italian ancestry, the reasons my family left the ethnic GHETTOS had more to do with upward mobility rather than some conspiracy to drive them out. The upwardly mobile had been leaving since the end of WWII, which in turn drove down the property values in the ethnic enclaves, which could NO LONGER sustain themselves without further immigration from Europe.